Theresa A. Koleck

Dr. Koleck’s program of research is dedicated to mitigating symptom burden in patients diagnosed with single or multiple chronic conditions using omics-based approaches and informatics/data science techniques, including clinical data mining, electronic health record (EHR) phenotyping, natural language processing, unsupervised machine learning, and data visualization. Dr. Koleck’s work characterizes the symptom landscape of chronic conditions throughout adulthood using both structured (e.g., diagnosis codes) and unstructured (e.g., clinical notes) EHR data.

Dr. Koleck is the Chair/Director of the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing Honors Program and serves as a co-facilitator of the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing Digital Health Hub Health Informatics and Data Science (HIDS) Core.

Research Areas & Scholarly Emphasis

Currently, Dr. Koleck’s research is capitalizing on the rich survey and EHR data collected as part the National Institutes of Health All of Us Research Program, an extraordinary initiative to build a disease and population-agnostic, longitudinal biomedical dataset from one million or more diverse individuals living in the United States. Given that chronic conditions are managed rather than cured, prevention and alleviation of symptoms is one of the greatest opportunities to promote healthy aging and improve patient wellbeing. As a highly specialized nurse scientist trained in genomics and biomedical informatics, Dr. Koleck is at the forefront of advancing symptom science for chronic conditions through innovative synergy of symptoms, omics, and informatics. Key research areas include Symptoms, Chronic conditions, Clinical data mining, Electronic health record phenotyping, Natural language processing, and Genetics/genomics.

Teaching

Dr. Koleck teaches NUR 0067 Nursing Research: An Introduction to Critical Appraisal and Evidence-based Practice, NUR 0086 Nursing Informatics, and NUR 3082 Introduction to Machine Learning in Healthcare.

Service

Dr. Koleck currently serves on the International Society of Nurses in Genetics (ISONG) Board of Directors as a Member-at-Large (2024-2026) and is leading the ISONG History Project. Dr. Koleck served as an All of Us Research Program Researcher Ambassador through Pyxis Partners from 2022-2024. In this invited role, she engaged in outreach, education, and awareness activities to explain and promote the All of Us Research Hub.